after all these years

after all these years,
it’s still about turf
still about peculiarities
and particularities
i don’t want to sail
in the salient
be drowned by your
1 sodium joined to your
glutamate maximus

after all these years, it’s still about seating privileges
ringers on phones instead of the ringing in my ears
commuting between hells on
ancient, reckless rails
that say nothing and
that say all too much
about their city

after all these years, it’s all about performance
and i don’t have any premeditations
i don’t turn it on and off
and i guess that makes me a sucker

but i know by now that when i’m non-representing something
it usually comes out better than when i’m representing something

after all these years it’s still
about imprecision in
a precise world
or was that about precision
in an imprecise world
–we’re more worried about reception
than blood vessels

and wherever i go, i unfortunately have to take myself
which creates problems with overhead
storage and weight specifications
absurdity: you can’t predict it, except when you can

and ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ are constructs
i can ‘teach’ you something unpleasant
you’ve just chosen not to see
and then you have so-called pulitzer prize winning columnists
saying naturalized american
"terrorists" shouldn’t be read
their miranda rights

and after all these years
the prisons are full of
petty offenders
while the real "terrorists"
walk among us

like how madoff would have
never been caught,
how he turned himself in
after he had little to do with
the billions he stole
while the world was starving
while the world was drowning in oil
while the world had nothing to eat or drink
because corporations fought their way in to
profit and spill

after all these years it’s still about the poor
getting raped in front of the rich
while the literate claim they have
no incentive to do anything

and the illiterate struggle and work
to retain some of the birthright
society would otherwise readily
take away
to justify some other dream
of fascist perfection
–and it’s not outright murder,
but it’s murder

so while the rich are busy
with their calculations figuring
out what offsets what,
the poor are left no other
choice but to live out
these zero-sum experiments
and the rich would have you
believe it’s melodrama, there’s
no real pain, it’s just image,
except they have no reason to tell you
it’s their image they’ve made
and it’s very hard to see anything else
and soon seeing will be made a crime.